Check Your Jewish Privilege

Although the expression has been in use for twenty-five years, it was not until two weeks ago that I actually heard the phrase “check your privilege.” Coined by social justice activist Peggy McIntosh in a 1988 article called “Unpacking the Invisible Backpack,” the expression “check your privilege” refers to the act of acknowledging the advantages and benefits conferred upon you by the fact of your having been born into a particular race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. A longtime advocate for women’s rights, McIntosh knew the universe of entitlements extended to men, entitlements which, being denied to exist by those very men, were systemically enforced. The stir surrounding her article was that McIntosh turned the lens of self-examination on herself, courageously raising the question of race, and the degree to which she carried an “invisible weightless knapsack” of unearned assets and privileges simply by having been born white. The list ranged from the structural to the mundane: the choice of what neighborhood to live in, the comfort of having never been racially profiled, and the ease of being able to find dolls, toys and greeting cards featuring people of her own race. In “checking her privilege” as a white woman, McIntosh identified for herself and the rest of the world the earned and unearned advantages conferred on her and denied to people of color, a small, but altogether necessary first step towards addressing the systemic inequalities of our society.

But it was not until two weeks ago that the conversation about checking one’s privilege turned to the Jewish community. Tal Fortgang, a Princeton University freshman, wrote a piece on the subject in the Princeton Tory, soon republished to a wider readership in Time magazine. As a white Jewish male on a college campus, Fortgang had been told on several occasions to “check his privilege,” lest he forget that the benefits he enjoys in his advantaged existence are neither earned, nor shared by all, but rather byproducts of his fortuitous birth. Responding to such claims, Fortgang unleashed a torrent of his family’s historical narrative, objecting to the insinuation that his station in life had come easy. “Perhaps,” he begins, “it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a DP camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until WWII ended.” “Or maybe,” Fortgang writes, “it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures …” “Perhaps,” he continues, “it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.” How dare they? Those people, Fortgang rages, demand that I check my privilege, not knowing my past. Fortgang concludes his piece with a strident air, “I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing.”

As important as it is to read Fortgang, I also urge you to read the response written by Samuel Freedman in last week’s Forward. Freedman explains that Fortgang, in drawing on his family’s past sufferings in the Shoah, has overlooked the incredibly blessed and fortuitous circumstances of his own existence. “… If you are able to live in New Rochelle, New York, and if you are able to attend the SAR Academy Day School, both of which Fortgang has done, and if just maybe you also had tutoring or test-prep classes, and at the least had the proximate example of college-educated parents, none of that means you did not toil; it just meant that you started your toil with assets not available to the children of less prosperous, less educated families.” “As a college freshman,” Freedman explains, “Fortgang necessarily lacks the perspective to see that his family’s history, indeed Jewish history, is a saga of both persecution and achievement, of being both underdog and overdog … He does not seem to accept the existence of inherited advantage.”

The storm prompted by the dueling articles was undoubtedly not due to any one individual or college campus. Rather, the exchange touched on a much bigger and much more sensitive nerve about the contemporary Jewish condition – Jewish power, Jewish persecution, and our uneasy efforts to balance the reality of the two. Such a small people, so much hurt, and yet so many Nobel prizes. A people despised and dispersed; a full third of us exterminated a mere seventy years ago. And yet, look around you: we aren’t doing so bad. A quarter of the world’s population, according to ADL statistics released this month, is anti-Semitic. The threat is present and real and the shootings in Brussels this past week only remind us of this fact. And yet, never before, by any metric, have the Jewish people been as secure, safe, and frankly, powerful as we are now. No, it was not always this way, but to be born Jewish today is to be born into the most privileged circumstances. Certainly, if you, like me, are under fifty, then you arrived in this world as a Jew with advantages that are yours to enjoy but not entirely of your own making. It is a disorienting set of circumstances, we are not exactly sure what to do about it, and so it is understandable if we are a bit sensitive when it is discussed publicly.

It is a circumstance, incidentally, that is not entirely without precedent. One need look no further than the protagonist of this week’s haftarah, Samson, to encounter a man whose privileged stature was pre-ordained, literally, in utero. An angel of the Lord appeared to Samson’s mother: “… you shall conceive and bear a son ... the boy is to be a Nazirite to God from the womb on. He shall be the first to deliver Israel from the Philistines.” (Judges 13:5) This would not be the last Jewish boy to arrive in this world to a Jewish mother believing him to be the center, if not the savior, of the universe. And while the presence of my wife and son dictate that I choose my next few words carefully, we do not need a degree in psychology to telescope the consequences of being raised by a smothering Jewish mother with such a inflated estimation of her offspring. The coddling and hand-holding, leading to privilege, leading to entitlement, and yes – because we know how Samson’s story will turn out – eventually to an abdication of purpose. The tragedy of Samson isn’t merely that he grew up to be a slothful, weak-willed, Philistine womanizer. The tragedy of Samson is that he came into this world to fulfill an explicit purpose in the arc of Jewish history. He had the tools, he had the strength, he had the gifts; and then he fell short. He failed to check the privilege of his existence and thus failed to fulfill the very reason for his being. As numerous scholars have pointed out, the tale of Samson is not just the story of a single man, or a morality tale with universal application. Samson is Israel personified; his failure represents the failed opportunity of Israel to assess its circumstances and fulfill its generational obligations.

It is a story that hits uncomfortably close to home for our generation. The more I thought about the Fortgang-Freedman exchange, the more I came to believe that they failed to raise the question that actually matters. The invocation of one’s past suffering, important as it may be, is entirely secondary to the question of one’s present and future. In a world of privilege, it doesn’t really matter whether you arrived at that station by way of persecution or not. What ultimately matters is, what are you going to do with that privilege today? If you are Jewish and alive right now, then you are living in the best one percent of one percent of all of Jewish history. The comfort, the security, the resources, the State of Israel – it has never been so good. My fear, however, is that we – like Samson – are so coddled by our circumstances that we are missing the historic window of opportunity in which we live. We turn our energies and our hearts away from our people, believing that because there is no existential crisis, our attention and contributions are not needed. We tell ourselves that the Jewish world can live without us, our engagement, and our support. This is wrong! As my high school cross-country coach once screamed at me: “Cosgrove, races are won and lost on the downhills!” It is precisely because of our circumstances that we must be alert to the needs of the hour. We have a purpose to play in the arc of Jewish history. It is precisely at moments like this that we must plan for the Jewish future, building the institutions and identities that will hold us in strength. This is the litmus test of our people. Sure we have our share of self-made men, but the heroes of our people – like Joseph, Moses and Queen Esther – are those individuals who came to understand that it was precisely because of their privilege, precisely because the easy, purposeless life was theirs if they wanted it, that they must choose otherwise. They are our heroes because despite their station in life, or more precisely, because of their station in life, they threw their lot in with our people, making the contributions for which future generations remain eternally grateful.

Akavyah Ben Mahalel taught: “Reflect upon three things and you will not come to commit sin. Know from where you came, to where you are going, and before whom you will be called on to give an account and reckoning.” (Pirkei Avot 3:1) All living things have a common and modest origin. No matter who we are – rich or poor, privileged or persecuted – we all have a single fate. These are the equalizers shared by every one of us. But some of us, and I would dare say, all of us in this room, have been born into circumstances about which past generations could have only dreamed. So yes, check your privilege. Live with an awareness that you have been afforded opportunities and gifts enjoyed neither by your predecessors nor by most of humanity today. Let the feeling sink in, be grateful for it, there is no shame in it; you can even enjoy it. And now ask the next question, the one that really matters. In the words of the Psalmist: “How can I repay the Lord for this bounty bestowed unto me?” (116:12) Leverage the question, let it inspire you, and most importantly let it motivate you do something fantastic towards the betterment of our people.